FedEx Wants to Be a Data Company With Planes
AI platforms now sit at the center of its logistics network. Public filings don’t yet quantify their standalone financial impact
At the India AI Impact Summit 2026, CEO Rajesh Subramaniam said “the recent exponential growth of AI has the potential to be one of the most significant events in human society since the advancement of electric power systems and the introduction of the internet.” He added, “AI is no longer a trend. It’s the next industrial system: a union of compute, energy and labor that will redefine how economies operate and how humanity evolves.”
FedEx transports approximately 17 million packages per day across more than 220 countries and territories and moves more than $2 trillion in goods annually, according to its 2025 Global Economic Impact Report. At its 2026 Investor Day, the company said it generates roughly two petabytes of data per day across its network.
For context, FedEx’s logistics scale sits atop a substantial financial base: the company reported $87.9 billion of revenue in fiscal 2025, while capital spending that year totaled about $4.1 billion (≈4.6% of revenue). Management says it achieved $2.2 billion in DRIVE structural cost reductions in fiscal 2025 and has delivered about $4.0 billion of structural savings since fiscal 2023: figures that make any data-driven efficiency gain immediately material to the company’s margins.
Subramaniam said, “building AI capabilities is not optional. It’s essential.” He added, “intelligence is not an asset. It’s infrastructure: the foundation of the future of global progress, productivity and economic growth.”
FedEx has reorganized parts of its business around applying artificial intelligence to that physical network. The company has launched data platforms, commercial integrations, and predictive systems across its operations.
The AI push is nested inside a larger cost-reduction and network modernization program. FedEx’s DRIVE and Network 2.0 initiatives have been explicit about transforming operations, and management has tied digital and automation scaling to further margin expansion and transformation savings for fiscal 2026 and beyond. In other words, AI is being positioned not only as new revenue potential but as a lever to defend and expand operating margins on a capital-intensive platform.
Building the Intelligence Layer on a Global Network
FedEx established FedEx Dataworks to convert operational data into analytics services and customer-facing products. The unit develops APIs and analytics tools built on shipment and network telemetry.
In 2025, FedEx Dataworks announced a collaboration with ServiceNow to embed FedEx shipment data into enterprise workflow systems. The companies said logistics signals could trigger planning and service management workflows.
FedEx Dataworks also partnered with Dun & Bradstreet to launch the Retail Momentum Index, positioned as a near real-time indicator of U.S. retail supply and demand trends.
Alongside commercial analytics, FedEx has deployed predictive systems inside its own operations. The company also introduced the FedEx Import Tool in India to simplify customs workflows for small and medium enterprises. The tool provides automated shipment tracking and logistics updates.
Investor materials reference machine-learning models for route optimization, estimated delivery times, and network balancing. Subramaniam said, “this is not just visibility into what happened, but intelligence about what will happen next.”
Management’s guidance links future capital allocation to digital and automation spending: FY2026 priorities reiterated $4.5 billion in capital spending with an explicit focus on network optimization, fleet and facility modernization and automation, indicating that AI is being funded as part of discrete capex and modernization projects rather than a purely incremental software expense. The FY2025 reduction in capex to about $4.1 billion (from $5.2 billion) also highlights how investments are being prioritized and reprioritized in pursuit of higher asset utilization.
These initiatives reflect FedEx’s stated objective to “orchestrate the intelligence that governs modern commerce,” as Subramaniam put it.
Competitors Have Published Quantified Outcomes
Some logistics and technology operators have publicly described quantified operational improvements associated with artificial intelligence or machine-learning systems.
Amazon has outlined machine-learning models used to coordinate robotics and optimize fulfillment flows across its warehouse network. In official newsroom updates, Amazon has referenced measurable productivity and throughput improvements linked to those systems.
DHL Group has described predictive analytics and AI-enabled risk monitoring tools such as Resilience360, and has publicly referenced operational and efficiency gains associated with robotics and digitalization initiatives.
These disclosures reference quantified or measurable operational outcomes tied to AI or machine-learning deployments.
Subramaniam said, “you cannot innovate from the sideline. If you don’t like change, you will hate extinction.” FedEx’s infrastructure build-out is visible. Public reporting does not currently provide comparable discrete, AI-specific financial attribution.